VIC authorities still racing to find source of legionnaires outbreak

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Victorian health authorities are still racing to pinpoint the source of a deadly legionnaires outbreak, as the Melbourne cluster claims a second life.

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00:00Dr Clare Looker, who is Victoria's Chief Health Officer, says that 54 out of the around 100

00:08cooling towers in Derrimut and Laverton North have now been tested and disinfected.

00:15This area is largely industrial and it's in Melbourne's western suburbs and investigators

00:20have been able to narrow down the possible source of this outbreak to the western suburbs

00:26and they believe that this is where the outbreak has originated from.

00:31They are asking for the latest test results from around 1,000 cooling towers right across

00:37Melbourne, but Dr Looker says that it is really possible that this could have been a colonisation

00:43of the Legionella bacterium in one of these western suburbs cooling towers that has subsequently

00:49been cleared and epidemiologists agree with this.

00:52We've heard from Professor Catherine Bennett from Deakin University, she says that what

00:57health authorities normally will do is try to disinfect and fix any potential threat

01:03to the public straight away while they're testing, so it is possible that this has already

01:10been neutralised and she says that means that in a transient source like this it is very

01:15possible that we might never actually know which cooling tower was to blame for this

01:20outbreak.

01:21What we do know though is that this outbreak encompasses now 77 people with a further seven

01:27suspected cases, 75 of those have required hospitalisation and we're expecting to hear

01:33more details on how many further cases might have eventuated between about four and five

01:39o'clock this afternoon when those latest figures are released to the public.

01:43We've also heard that sadly there has been a second death in this Legionnaires disease

01:48outbreak, a man aged in his 60s has died and that follows the death of a woman aged

01:54in her 90s earlier.

01:56Dr Claire Looker says that we are likely to see potentially the tail end of this outbreak,

02:03she says that it's a really positive sign that we have seen the number of those positive

02:07cases start to slow and she says that regardless of that it's still really important for anybody

02:15who has visited Melbourne since mid-July and who exhibits the symptoms of Legionnaires

02:20disease, so that is like a chest infection or flu-like symptoms, so fevers, chills, cough,

02:27headache and muscular aches and the like, to just go along to their GP and get tested

02:32or get checked out by their GP who might be able to rule out Legionnaires disease as a

02:37potential cause.

02:39Now this is the biggest Legionnaires outbreak that the country has seen since the Melbourne

02:44Aquarium outbreak back in the year 2000 and that's when we saw 125 cases and four deaths.

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